Stowaway to Mars (18 page)

Then, abruptly, her decision was taken out of her hands. A touch on her arm caused her to turn, and she found herself face to face, not with a machine, but with a man.

For several seconds she stared at him without moving. So far from wearing protective clothing, he was clad only in a pair of kilted shorts made from some gleaming material and fastened about his waist by a worked metal belt. His skin was of a reddish tinge, his chest broad and deep, and he was but little taller than herself. His head, beneath its covering of black hair, was of quite unusual size, and the ears, though they were not unsightly and grew closely, were decidedly bigger than those of any Earthman. The rest of his features were unusual only for the fineness of their formation without suggesting weakness and their regularity without loss of character. The eyes were dark and yet penetrating. They seemed to suggest a faint long melancholy, yet they were not truly sad. A queer creature, she thought, but with a kind of charm ... Then, as she watched, there came a slight crinkling at the corners of the eyes and a friendly smile about his mouth. She never again thought of him as a 'queer creature' . . . .

He lifted one hand and signed that she should take off the oxygen mask, but she hesitated. It might be safe enough for him, but her lung capacity could scarcely compare with that beneath his great chest. He repeated the sign insistently, pointing back towards the doors through which she had come. It occurred to her for the first time that the purpose of the double doors must have been that of an airlock. She lifted her mask experimentally. It seemed all right; moreover, as she breathed with out its assistance she realized that the air was not only denser within the building, but warmed. She slipped the mask right off with a sigh of relief. It became the man's turn to stare, and hers to return the friendly smile. He spoke. She guessed that he was using the same language as the machines, but his voice was full and pleasing. She shook her head, still smiling, but it was clear that the gesture was as unfamiliar to him as his words were to her. She ripped open the fastener of her suit impatiently and felt in her pockets. No pencil nor pen, but among other femininities almost unused during the voyage she found a lipstick: that would have to serve. She crouched down and explained her difficulty in carmine characters on the floor. The man understood: he took the lipstick from her and wrote an instruction for her to follow him.

THE sun sank lower and the shadows stretched long distorted fingers across the desert as though the powers of darkness were reaching out to grasp the land. Desert and sky were repainted by the reddened glow, and even the bushes to the west lost for a few short minutes their dreary reality and underwent a fiery glorification. Presently the last arc sank below their tops; a few fugitive red gleams escaped between the swaying branches, and then night came. Through their padded suits the men from the Gloria Mundi felt something of the chill which crept across the Martian sands.

Four times the rank of machines had made a suicidal advance, and four times it had retreated to re-equip itself with parts of the fallen. Now it stood inactive, but ominous; a line of grotesque shapes in dim silhouette against the darkening sky.

The situation was telling on the four men. The very inhumanity of their enemies, their uncanniness and, above all, their unknown potentialities made it impossible for them to maintain the front they might have shown to normal dangers. Their minds seemed to alternate between contempt for mere undirected mechanism, and an exaggerated fear of it. The predicament was getting on their nerves.

'Damn the things,' muttered the doctor. 'I believe they know we're caught.

They're only machines. They don't need food and drink, and if they need air at all, they've got enough. Standing there like that, using no fuel whatever their fuel may be they're good for a century if they like. We've got to move sooner or later and, damn them, they know we've got to move.'

'No good getting the wind up,' Dale advised curtly. 'We can last a good many hours yet. Something may happen before then.'

Froud agreed. 'A planet capable of producing things like that is capable of making anything happen. How long is the night in these parts?'

'Not much longer than at home. We're pretty near the equator.'

The first moon, Deimos, slid up from the ragged horizon, and the sand turned silver beneath it. The polished hull of the ship glittered under it, seeming tantalizingly close, but the rank of machines also gleamed, drawn across the way. The moonlight seemed to invest the metal shapes with a harsher relentlessness, and the sharp shadows it cast from them were even more uncouth than the originals. The men lay silent, each racking his brains for a plan. Nearly two hours passed, and the night be came brighter still.

'Lord, isn't that glorious?' Froud said.

The second moon, the smaller Phobos, raced up the sky, rushing to overtake Deimos. They looked up at it.

'What a speed! You can see it go.'

Dugan was the least impressed.

'You'd show speed, too, if you had to do the round trip in seven and a half hours,' he said practically.

Dale rose suddenly to his feet.

'I've had enough of this. I'm going to make a break for it. You can cover me. Those machines must have packed up for the night. They've not moved since before sunset.'

But he was wrong. He had gone less than a dozen yards before the rank stirred, clanking faintly in the thin air. He hesitated and advanced a further couple of paces.

'Come back,' Dugan called. 'You'll never be able to rush it at that distance.' Dale recognized the truth of it. Even with the increased speed and agility which Mars gave he would not stand a chance of escaping all the tentacles which would grope for him. He turned reluctantly and came slowly back.

Phobos overtook its fellow moon and disappeared. Before long Deimos had followed it round to the other side of the world. In the succeeding dimness the machines were scarcely distinguishable. The four men depended on their ears to give them the first warning of movement, but there was nothing to hear save the faint singing of the wind stirred sand. They began to suffer from hunger and thirst particularly thirst. The small quantities of water in their bottles had long ago given out, and their only food, hard cakes of chocolate, had increased their desire for drink. More than an hour passed without anyone speaking.

'There's only one thing for it,' Dale said at last. 'We shall have to do the attacking. If our ammunition holds out we may have a chance, if it doesn't, well, it can't be as bad as what will happen if we stay here. The orders will be: "Shoot for their lenses, and keep clear of their tentacles." '

In his own mind he had not much doubt that he was suggesting the impossible, but with a choice between a quick end and lingering asphyxiation he preferred the former both for himself and for his men.

'You, Dugan and Froud, take the sides '

'Wait a minute! What's that?' The doctor held his head a little on one side, listening. The others caught the sound. A deep throbbing, growing momentarily louder. They placed it somewhere beyond the canal. Evidently the diaphragms of the machines had picked it up too. The line could be seen faintly stirring.

Low in the western sky a gleam of red light became visible. The throbbing grew quickly to a thunderous roar. Dugan was the first to see the effect on the machines. He looked down in time to see them scampering for the cover of the bushes.

'Now's our chance,' he cried, and with the others behind him he ran down that side of the Sandhill which was closest to the Gloria Mundi.

The noise from the sky became a crashing, deafening din. Whatever was up there seemed to be making straight for them. Dale and Froud flung themselves flat on the sand with their hands clamped over their ears, and a moment later the other two did the same. The whole world seemed to be cracking and trembling with a noise which split the very sky asunder. Louder and yet louder until noise could be no louder. A sheet of flame like a long fiery banner trailed across the sky bathed the desert with a queer, unnatural light. There was a tremor of the ground. Abruptly the noise stopped, leaving behind it a shocking silence. A scorching breath as hot as a flame itself swept over the sand. A rush of cooler air followed, raising a miniature sandstorm. Froud rolled over on his side, blinking at Dale through the dust. Dale was temporarily deaf from the uproar, and though he saw Froud's mouth moving, he could hear nothing. But he guessed the question.

'That,' he bawled back, 'was another rocket.'

Dale looked out of the window. The other rocket lay perhaps two miles away, her after part just visible above the curve of a Sandhill.

'But where the devil can she have come from?' he asked at large for approximately the tenth time.

The four of them were safely back in the living room. The Gloria Mundi was intact. The machines they had seen moving about her had either been unable to open her or uninquisitive enough to be satisfied with an exterior examination. In her crew, curiosity about the new arrival was warring with a desire for sleep. In any case they must wait before finding out more, for the oxygen cylinders needed recharging a process which would normally have been Burns' job, but which now fell to Dugan.

'Heaven knows,' said Froud. 'Bigger than the G.M., isn't she?'

'Difficult to tell. She may be nearer than she looks. Distance is so damned deceptive here.'

The doctor joined them.

'What next?' he asked. 'Do we look for Joan, or do we investigate the stranger?'

Dale frowned. 'If we had any clue at all, I'd say look for her, but as it is, what can we do? We've not the slightest idea what happened to her, we daren't split up to search, in fact we can't even risk searching all four of us together. Honestly, I don't think there's much hope.'

'I see.' The doctor nodded slowly. 'You think she's gone the way Burns went?'

'Something like that, I'm afraid.'

They all stared out over the inhospitable desert, avoiding one another's eyes.

'A very brave lady. I'm glad she was right,' said the doctor.

There was a long pause before Froud said, with unwanted diffidence:

'May I suggest that rather than investigate the stranger, as Doc puts it, we let the stranger investigate us? To tell you the truth, I'm beginning to feel that this place is far less healthy than we suppose; certainly it's not as empty as we thought, and it seems to me that if anyone is to be caught in the open either by the machines returning or by anything else that may show up, it would be better if it were the other fellows.'

Dale hesitated. He was actively anxious to find out more about the other rocket, yet Froud had made a point.

'You think the machines will come back?'

'If the arrival of one rocket interested them, the arrival of two should interest them still more,' Froud fancied. The doctor supported him.

'I don't see that we are justified in exposing ourselves to unnecessary risks. After all, our trip here will have been of no use to anyone if we don't make the trip back again.'

'And you, Dugan?' Dale asked.

Dugan looked round, his hand still on the valve of the oxygen chargers. 'I don't care: But I do know one thing: I want to get back to Earth. And I want to tell all those people who laughed at Joan and her father that they were right. Just now it all rather depends, doesn't it, on whether we've any chance of getting back at all?'

'Meaning?'

'Well, we hadn't a large margin of spare fuel to begin with, and Joan's extra weight made us use more than we had reckoned. Have we enough to take us back, and to stop when we get there?'

All three looked at Dale. He answered slowly:

'I think we have anyway, we've more than a sporting chance of making it. You see, whereas six of us came here, it seems that only four will return. Besides, there are quite a number of heavy things such as rifles and ammunition which we can jettison. They'll be of no further use to us after we leave here.'

Dugan nodded. 'I hadn't thought of that. Well, then,

I'm with Froud and Doc. Let the other rocket people come and look at us if they want to.'

Several hours later Dale still sat by the window, keeping watch. Occasionally he looked across at one of the others, half enviously. He wished that he too could have lain down to catch up some overdue sleep, but he knew that it would be useless for him to attempt it while the problem of the other ship's identity remained unsolved.

It was possible that the ship was native to Mars, but he did not find it easy to swallow such a palatable hope. She was meant for space travel no doubt about that. Other wise she would have had wings, big wings, too, in this thin air. Was she, he wondered, a Martian space ship returning home from another planet, possibly from Earth? Joan's story seemed to show that this world had sent out at least one messenger successfully. Again he was anxious to think so, but all the time something at the back of his mind was repeating insistently the thing he least wanted to believe: that this ship had followed the Gloria Mundi from Earth.

That was the fear which would not let him rest. He had been the first to reach Mars, but that was a job only half done. He must be the first to tell Earth about Mars. The leader of the first successful interplanetary journey in the history of the world. Dale Curtance, the Conqueror of Space a name which should never be forgotten. And now he faced the possibility of a rival who might snatch immortality out of his very hands.

Had he been able, he would have taken off this very moment, heading the Gloria Mundi for Earth with all the speed of which she was capable, but it was impracticable for several reasons, of which the most immediate was that she now lay on her side. Before they could start, they would have to raise her to the perpendicular.

Dale was not a good loser. He had won too often since that day when he had led the first equatorial dash round the world. The Martian venture was to be the crown of his career. Not for the five million dollars to hell with that, he had spent more than that on building and fuelling the G.M. No, it was for the triumph of being not just the first, but for a time the only man to have linked the planets. It was the thought that this other ship might mean his failure in that which kept him at the window for almost unendurable hours while his companions slept and daylight came again.